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04.12.05 by Doc @ 2:22 pm  
Written by Simon R. Green John Taylor has spent the last few years trying to forget his past. From a dingy office in a bad part of London, he works as a private eye, assisted greatly by a supernatural (literally) ability to find anything that someone wants found. He can't pay the rent, sleeps on the sofa in his office, and generally exists as an embodiment of every P.I. cliche in the book. That is, until his newest client walks in the door. Joanna Barrett is a very wealthy woman, and her daughter has gone missing. Sounds like little trouble, until Ms. Barrett mentions where her daughter is believed to have gone: Nightside. Nightside is Taylor's home, or was. It's the dark heart of London, possibly of the world, a place where it's always 3 a.m. and where anything can be bought for the right price. Nightside is a magical place, inaccessible to most ordinary people, but Taylor isn't ordinary. He's not sure what he is, exactly, as he has no idea who (or what) gave birth to him...only that it was horrible enough that his father drank himself to death shortly thereafter. Taylor has been running from Nightside for years, because for some reason a large number of very powerful people there seem to want him dead, for reasons he's never been clear on. But he needs the money. Badly. And the girl could be in serious trouble if she stumbled into Nightside accidentally or fell in with the wrong crowd once she got there. So Taylor takes the case, and must step back into the dangerous world that he's been trying to forget, risking his life to find some pampered rich girl runaway before she gets herself killed, or worse. Categorized as: Books and Reviews
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12.07.03 by Cosette @ 11:27 pm
Written & Illustrated by Ian Falconer Okay...I really love children's books. Well written and/or illustrated, of course. And I don't even have kids. I'm just a connoisseur. So when I found Olivia while browsing in a bookstore one day, I knew I had to have it. Categorized as: Books and Reviews
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12.07.03 by Dindrane @ 11:26 pm 
Written by: Roger Smith This fascinating text was designed to help teachers of any subject integrate environmental education into their classrooms. Carefully designed to be usable in grades 4-9, this book is an invaluable resource for teachers, parents, homeschoolers, and just concerned individuals alike. Part I of the book is devoted to "Exploring the Environment and the Universe," with such lessons as viewing the stars, exploring time, and developing empathy. Part II is dedicated to Change, and projects here include making fossil casts, demonstrating earthquakes, water erosion, and observing metamorphosis in animals. Part III is "Unity: The Wholeness of Nature," where students look at such lessons as Nature’s interconnections, food chains, biomes, endangered species, adaptations to change, and much more. Part IV is the Finite Planet, and students will learn about such things as forests and how trees modify climate, population and food issues, waste management and junk art, and the touch process of making choices about dealing with the environment. All activity sections come with a "learning objectives" statement and full background notes, and each individual activity is clearly worded and includes suggestions for use. Pages are easily separated from the binding for photocopying, and all hand-outs are copyright free, so that they may be actually used in a classroom situation where you might need 30 copies of a given page. Categorized as: Books and Reviews
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12.07.03 by Dindrane @ 5:31 pm 
Written by: Amy Hall The Joy of Being a Woman is basically a long list of things--reasons why it rocks to be a woman. Interspersed among these reasons are inspiring and amusing quotes about womanhood. The many roles women must adapt as our lives progress are all covered, from friendship to motherhood to wifery. As Ntozake Shange says as quoted in this book, "where there is a woman, there is magic." This book will go a ways towards remind us of why. Hall's 500 reasons vary from the intensely personal ("ribbed condoms") to the universal ("finally reaching some common ground with your mother-in-law"). They tend to be very simple things, such as the relief of finding a good psychologist, and do not depend upon a woman being from any specific walk of life or geographical region. While some require motherhood ("your child's artwork"), not many of them do, so very few readers should feel disenfranchised or occulted by this book. Categorized as: Books and Reviews
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12.07.03 by Doc @ 3:25 pm  Written by: Tom Robbins As a matter of full disclosure, I must admit up front that I am a Robbins completist. I've read 'em all, and liked 'em all. I am overjoyed by the fact that there still exists a cadre of writers for whom composition is the reason they write, rather than the process they must suffer through to tell their tales. Robbins takes a palpable joy in the written word, and the endless possibilities of simile and metaphor (pushing both to their absolute limit at every opportunity). That said, Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates is fantastic. Not Robbins' best (which title still belongs rightfully to Skinny Legs and All), but definitely Robbins AT his best. As with most of his novels, the plot can be somewhat incidental, but here's a summary -- renegade CIA agent Switters must go to the Amazon on a good will recruiting trip for a new agent. As a favor to his elderly hacker grandmother (and in order to receive her fabulous Matisse in the will), he agrees to release her pet parrot in the Amazon while he's there. Straightforward, no? Weird, but straightforward. Categorized as: Books and Reviews
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12.07.03 by Dindrane @ 8:07 am  Grade: B+ Written by: Kent Nerburn Note: I have used the term "Indian" in this review to refer to the conglomeration of peoples living on the North American continent before whites came. This is the term the Indians in the book use, and as Dan points out in the text, each word was given by the whites and as false as any other, so why differentiate and pretend one is somehow better? Neither Wolf Nor Dog is a cross between travel narrative and Native American manifesto. We have the story of Kent Nerburn himself, summoned to Lakota lands at the behest of Dan, who appreciates some work Nerburn has done on other collections of Native tales. Dan wants Nerburn to help him write down his thoughts about what it means to be an Indian. There are a few faults with this book, unfortunately. Dan's thoughts are not always logical, which Nerburn is not loathe to mention, and the resulting problem is that we told over and over, in many poetic and emotional speeches, how horrible white men are, which we knew, but are not so much told what we can do about it. Perhaps this is because there is nothing we can do about it? But then, why go to all the trouble to write, edit, and produce the book at all? Over and over, we are told not to "use" Indians for their wisdom--which is a very good point--yet we are expected to see Dan's wisdom as valid and to listen to him; he sets himself up as the wise man, and yet doesn't want us to see him only as the wise man--perhaps this is why we see him, warts and all. Dan treats Nerburn rather badly frequently, but gets no word of apology, as if he should be made to suffer. In the end, Dan is a human being as we are, and this is a good point to learn: he's not some stereotypical "wise man." Categorized as: Books and Reviews
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12.07.03 by Widge @ 5:54 am  Written by Neil Gaiman Coraline Jones is a young lady who is very, very bored. Her family has just moved into a new flat and her mother and father have plenty of work to do that doesn't involve keeping her entertained. Her new neighbors, two former actresses and the ringmaster of an all-mouse circus, seem interesting enough--but interactions with them can only take up so much time. In her explorations of her new surroundings, Coraline finds a door that doesn't go anywhere. When the building, formerly a house, was converted into flats, they separated one half of the structure from the other with a brick wall--so this door opens onto brick. But one day the door opens on a corridor, one that leads to her other flat. And to her other parents, who want nothing more than to keep her entertained and well-fed...forever. Many, many moons ago I had the distinct pleasure of hearing Gaiman do a reading of about the first third of this novel, which he introduced as a "spooky story for little girls", and I never forgot Coraline or her button-eyed other parents...and how the entire thing creeped the hell out of me. And now that the rest of the story is known, I can say it was definitely worth the wait. Categorized as: Books and Reviews
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12.07.03 by Dindrane @ 5:31 am 
Written by: Walter F. Otto Dionysus may not have been one of the Olympians and is therefore often left out of basic books on Greek religion. However, as Otto's book proves, this does not in any case prove that Dionysus' worship was not both vital and widespread. Forget what some people might tell you about Bacchus, the frat boy god--his cults were definitely more than wine, women, and song, even if that was, at times, part of them. First, a note on the use of the word "cult" by both the author and myself. As Palmer states in his translator's note, the word is not intended to carry any judgement or placement within a religion's hierarchy. Instead, it merely means the acts of worshippers, sometimes as distinct from concrete, formalized liturgy. Cults are, essentially, a particular expression of a given religion, along with the attendant rites and ceremonies. Nothing negative is meant by the term. Categorized as: Books and Reviews
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12.07.03 by Dindrane @ 3:59 am 
Written by: A.S. Byatt Many people know of Byatt's work through her excellent and Booker prize-winning novel Possession. The Game, however, is nearly as worthy as that other novel, but relatively unknown. The plot revolves around sisters, Julia and Cassandra, who as children played a game revolving around a fictional world of Arthurian Romance. As adults though, Julia and Cassandra have not only been forced to leave their imaginary world behind, but have drifted from each other. The catalyst of the action is the arrival of a man from their past, one they have both loved, who is bent upon manipulating them for his own ends. The characters, while both brilliant, talented, and gifted in their own ways, can also be bitter, petty, vindictive, jealous, and selfish. In other words, just like real sisters can be. Cassandra, the smart, serious one, is a medievalist, teaching Arthurian literature at Oxford. Julia, the pretty, vivacious one, writes romance novels (that's "romance" with a little "r"). Both of them have suffered in love at the hands of Simon, a none-too-stable herpetologist. Categorized as: Books and Reviews
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12.07.03 by Dindrane @ 3:14 am  Written by: Mark Z. Danielewski House of Leaves contains text that you may recognize from a song by the musical artist Poe. This is the least of the oddities you will discover in these pages. It is at best a work of literary genius. It is at least an experimental text with interesting adjuncts and lexicography. The truth, as always, is somewhere in between. It is reminiscent of Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer for its complex narrative layering. Appendices contain poems, collages, sketches and photos, quotes, and a series of letters from Truant's mother in an insane asylum written to Truant. The premise of the layout is a kind of frame story: Johnny Truant has found an incomplete manuscript written by an old blind man named Zampanò. The text is ostensibly either an academic discussion of a non-existent film, or a novel. Truant is never certain. House of Leaves at large is annotated both by Truant himself and by the "editors." The film in question, "The Navidson Record," is supposedly a documentary made by a photojournalist who has moved into a house that is not what it seems. The least surprising thing about this house is that its internal measurements are in fact larger than its external dimensions. The strangeness progresses from there. Categorized as: Books and Reviews
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